2021: The year of the four emperors

 Merry Christmas, one and all!

I hope this December sees you fine and healthy after yet another year of pestilence and incompetently corrupt government. It's that time of year where people recap their writing successes and I jump on the bandwagon with my meagre offerings and a bit of free fiction.

But this year I have a surprising amount to shout about for I had four, count 'em, four, stories published this year. A phenomenal amount for me and I can't ever say thank you enough to those wonderful editors who picked my little stories.

First of all was Sacrificial Gasoline, published in New Maps in April. A story about incompetent and corrupt government, oddly enough, and it's interaction with climate change. It can be found here

The second appeared in the anthology A Quiet Afternoon 2 and is called Rab the Giant and the Problem Neighbour. It's a quieter piece about being a good neighbour and not jumping to conclusions and can be bought here

Third was Gentrification and the Dream House, published in KZine in June and available here

This one is my attempt at a proper portal fantasy, somewhat let down by the characters being in their forties and not their childhood.

Finally last month brought us Titanic Terrstructures, a fairly titanic book in it's own right and an anthology of stories set around ginormous SF structures. Mine also has Aunts and they can be found here

I am extremely happy about all of these and not a little shocked to see them all together like this. Sadly I'll not see this many in one go for a long while to come, if nothing else because my writing this year has been very bitty and inconsequential. I will blame it on a second year of pandemic based brain fog but abject laziness does have a part to play as well. Here's hoping that next year I can write more as I have a TV studio set thing I've been working on for ages I'd love to get out there and a thing about post-apocalyptic tablet that keeps gnawing at the back of my brain.

One thing I did mange to write was flash fiction in October, following the Glasgow Writer Circle prompts. The output from that can be found here if you didn't see it at the time here or on Twitter.

And now to the traditional Christmas gift of free fiction. This year I bring you Why did you leave your last employer? This was a story that got picked up for publishing last year, in 2020, but, due to the editor's politics not agreeing with mine, shall we say, I never pimped it. Unfortunate but I didn't feel happy directing people towards the magazine after some of the things the editor said.

Anyhoo, I now produce it here so you can see what it was. Hope you like it.

Life in the big House

 

I've got a new story out, yay! This one is in an anthology, Titanic Terastructures that can be found here, that is a set of stories all in some way related to ginormous SF thingumies of a Ringworld stylee. I am very much looking forward to reading this and seeing what huge and wondrous ideas people have written of.

As for my story, it is set in a place called The House which is a planet wide residence that has seen better days and is a 'living in the ruins' type of story. There may be quite a lot of dust but I hope you like it.

By way of a wee taster, I've put up a piece of flash fiction that I wrote a few years back that was my first visit to The House. Ever since then the setting has stuck in my head and keeps nagging me to write things about it. I've had a few goes at short stories and this is the most successful. Saying that, the idea keeps nagging me so there might be more.

The flash piece that created it all can be found here: The Oculus at the Edge of the Universe

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As Amazon is not great at showing all authors, here is a TOC for the book:

Honeysuckle for Ashes / Christopher R. Muscato

You Too Shall Pass / Russell Nichols

Jack, the Medbot and the Giant in the Sky / Laurel Beckley

Bang / Craig Russell

Fundamentals of Search and Rescue / Jennifer R. Donohue

Mothership / M.R. Parsons

Broken Circle / Manda Benson

Memento Mori / Johannes Toivo Svensson

Ashes to Ashes Dust to Stardust / Wendy Nikel

Under the Graying Sea / Jonathan Sherwood

Tharsis Dilemma / Matthew Ross

The Moment / Dan Piponi

The Big House / Bunny McFadden

The Sensation of Drowning / Dennis Mombauer

The Long Road Home / Andrew Gudgel

A Singular Event in the Fourth Dimension / Andrea M. Pawley

And the House Did Watch Over All / Brian M. Milton

The Long Sleep to Tera Terra / Mark Kirkbride

The What-The Tree / Liam Hogan

Haunting House / Mike Morgan

Heavenstair / Al Onia

Antimatter Dreams / David Wright

Distraction / Regina Clarke

Podfall / Barend Nieuwstraten III

The Kamacite Cage / Richard de Silva

Land of Opportunity / Gustavo Bondoni

Recurring dreams and dusty attics

Proving that story publications are like busses, I've another new one for your perusal. This time it is a story of old childhood memories and how market forces affects them. Or something.

Anywho, you can find it in Kzine issue 30 and it is called Gentrification and the Dream House.

This one had an odd gestation in that it is based on a recurring dream I've had all my life. Child, student, adult, the same basic scenario cropped up of my travelling through narrow passages in old houses and, a couple of years back, it came to me again. Only this time the dream was an angry rant about modern consumerism ruining old stuff.  As I'm sure happens in your dreams all the time too.

Other than being a sign that I'm getting old this inspired me to try to write down the feelings I was getting from the dream and, eventually, it evolved into the published story. Initially there was a lot more of the dream, i.e. passages and  non-sequitur weirdness but thanks to the lovely and clever people at the Glasgow Science Fiction Writer's Circle that was (sadly) cut to let the story that it morphed into appear.

Also inspirational was the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow which I went to while initially writing this and got distracted from the band looking at the ironwork. 

Now, while I have you here, not only is this out today, but, as previously mentioned, you can also find a story of mine in A Quiet Afternoon 2 which you can find here on pre-order, although the pdfs go out in only a few days time. 

And, since I've been having that sort of year which I promise this it the last of, a further reminder that back in April I also had a story out in New Maps which you can find here

I hope you enjoy and that the next time you're down the shops you consider the alternatives on offer and if you can get to them by a door half way up a wall.

Low risk reading for the win!

I have a new story coming out soon in a wee Canadian anthology called A Quiet Afternoon 2 and they've just opened their site for pre-orders. You can find it here

The anthology is a collection of relaxed stories ideal for a restful afternoon, something we could all do with these days. Apparently they had volume 1 out last year as a response to the pandemic and you can still find it on their website should you be in need of additional emergency sitting down.

My story is a partner to one I had published in Fireside back in December 2017 in that it features Rab the Giant again, this time having to deal with some problematic neighbours and his prejudices and assumptions. 

I like this one a lot and am very glad it's found a home, especially in something quite so suited to my interests of having a nice sit down and not getting wound up. Especially nice is that the publishers will make a donation to a local Canadian charity out of the proceeds so go on, look it up.

I hope you like it.

Special Glaswegian Offer: Due to the relaxed and Canadian nature of the anthology they asked me to tone down the language from it's Glaswegian default but if anyone wants to know how the original sounded I'm perfectly happy to come round your house and shout the obscenity at you from the street.

Sacrificial Gasoline

 

It's a new story! 

I'm very pleased to report that my story, Sacrificial Gasoline, has appeared in this wonderful publication, New Maps. You can find them here

New Maps showcases 'de-industrial' fiction and if you want more information on what that is, they have a great editorial all about it in the issue. Basically it's stories of the near future where humanity is struggling with the end of out current profligate pillaging of the planet and turning to a different way of living, whatever that may be. But not with some magic Start Trek clean energy gixmo. In my case, it's a tale told by an old granny of her childhood which is a generation or two from now.

I first wrote this quite a few years back and it has gone through a number of evolutions before finding it's home but probably the thing that distresses me the most about it is that its politics (and the politician in it) are only more relevant than they were then.

And finally a wee note on the inspiration for this story. It's often hard to know what, exactly, triggered an idea but in this case I can point to the album Songs From The Floodplain by Jon Boden. It's a (very good) album set in a similar de-industrial world and got my brain working great style. I highly recommend it and it's follow up Afterglow if you like the ideas in this magazine and/or English folk. 

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the story, for all its grim settings.